If you’re someone like me who spends a decent amount of time looking at how linking sites are performing, you’ll realize quite how brutal this last update was in the guest post / link market, says Paul Madden.
I recorded a little video… what I did here was:
Took a random list from the inventory of sites that brokers had pitched us in the past (not the sort of stuff we would normally touch but well-used from what I can see).
Pasted a random number into a spreadsheet and made it anonymous (I will never intentionally out a site no matter how bad).
I did this across 100 random sites with the following criteria:
— Came from a broker list
— Exist only for link sales
Of the 100, 68% were down to zero or had dropped significantly either in the last update or last year.
Conclusions:
— Significant cull of the ‘just for links‘ type sites
— If it’s on a broker list, you’re best checking if it’s still alive
Our process avoids these sites anyway but it’s interesting to see how hard Google has acted this time…
Google are NOT your friends.